Big Stone Head: Easter Island and Pop Culture
Sample pages
(blue web address lettering does not appear
in the real book!):
An excerpt
28 degrees 10 minutes south latitude
109 degrees 30 minutes west longitude.
On a sunny afternoon in April of 1722, the Dutch admiral
Jacob Roggeveen and his crew set foot upon dry land for the
first time in weeks. They had been searching for an
island allegedly spotted five decades earlier by the pirate
Edward Davis, an island not seen by any European since Davis
made his irreputable report. Upon landing at what was
probably Davis' isle, the good captain Roggeveen made note of
his discovery. He modestly declined to name the land
mass after himself, for this particular date was an important
holiday for those of his Christian faith: it was Easter
Sunday.
Nothing that the sailors may have dreamed up during the long
months of their voyage could possibly have been more unlikely
than what they discovered on the rocky shores of the speck of
land that their captain had dubbed Easter Island. They
encountered a friendly population of a few thousand locals who
had been toiling away in complete isolation for more than a
millennia, creating about nine hundred immense lava rock
statues in tribute to their ancestors. The islanders
called their colossal statues moai (which literally translates
simply to "figure". The islanders called their home
Matakiterangi (or "eyes looking at heaven"; but the names
Rapa Nui ("large island", ironically) and Te Pito o te Henua
("The Navel of the World" were later put into more common
use.
Certainly, an inveterate impression was made upon Roggeveen
and his crew. Imagine their complete sense of surprise
and awe at seeing these stoic effigies lined up on massive
ceremonial platforms (or ahu) all over the tiny
island. With no expectations about what lay ahead,
and with absolutely no foreknowledge of the existence of this
culture or these remarkable stone giants, the Dutch crew were
the first outsiders ever to gaze upon these big stone
heads. Stories of the island were circulated across the
globe, and it wasn't long before further explorers in
Roggeveen's wake made the voyage to Rapa Nui. They
brought goods and tales from around the world with them, as
well as war, disease, and Christianity; in return they took
slaves, stole sacred rongorongo tablets, and even absconded
with a few of the twenty-ton moai.
It's been almost three centuries since the first contact
between the Rapa Nui and the Dutch, and the powerful and
iconic image of the moai has now spread to every point on
Earth. There are few civilized people who have never
been exposed to the image of the moai in some form. The
legend of Easter Island has inspired as many imaginations as
the pyramids of Egypt, the discovery of dinosaurs, or the idea
of flights to Mars.
Serious scientific study of the island didn't begin until the
early 20th century. By then, plague, slave traders, and
intertribal warfare had toppled all of the moai from their
ahu, and had almost completely wiped out the Rapa Nui
population. The current islanders have no knowledge of
how the moai they live amongst were erected. The
archeologists looking for answers have raised perhaps more
questions than satisfying solutions. With almost no
trees on the island and no modern construction equipment, how
did rock statues between ten and forty feet tall appear and
then make their way to various points on the island, erect on
their ahu? Who built them and why? Why were they
eventually toppled over? What do the indecipherable
rongorongo tablets say? And what of the mysterious "birdman"
rituals?
These questions and many others have fueled the mythology
surrounding remote Easter Island, marking it for some as a
mystical and arcane place. This image, in turn, has only
reinforced the iconographic image of the moai world
wide. Beginning with Roggeveen, and then through the
time of Captain James Cook half a century later, and on to
visits from Katherine Routledge, William Mulloy, and Thor
Heyerdahl in modern times, people from across the globe have
made the arduous journey to Rapa Nui, bringing back fantastic
impressions of the unique and awe-inspiring stone
giants. These impressions have disseminated themselves
globally, informing every citizen in the educated world about
a little dot in the middle of the southeast Pacific called
Rapa Nui, 64 square miles in size, and 2300 miles from the
next nearest center of population.
As popular culture and mass media exploded through the 20th
century, the instantly recognizable stony visage of the moai
has made its way into the consciousness of virtually
everyone. These solemn and uncomplaining effigies of
dead ariki (clan leaders) have been repurposed by a
consumerist culture: from sacred relics of the Rapa Nui people
into a marketable icons, free of copyright, for use the world
over. Seen by the even casual observer in the most
unlikely of places, the moai has become a universal symbol for
the unexplained, the exotic, the numinous, the infrangible,
the enchanted, and the weird. By the 1940s, Easter
Island was being featured in liquor ads, by the 1960s replica
moai were standing outside of Las Vegas casinos, and by 2003,
the image had devolved into something suitable for use on a
tissue box; but somehow the stoic ancestors of Rapa Nui have
maintained their dignity through all of this.
But still these nagging questions: why did the islanders spend
centuries building the moai? And, centuries after being
forsaken by their builders, why are the moai now worshiped,
after a fashion, by the population of the rest of the world?
We may discover that neither of these questions has a fully
satisfying answer, but the journey itself is often the
destination, so journey with me now to Rapa Nui, the navel of
the world, where our story begins...
©2009 James Teitelbaum all
rights reserved.